Crossing Boundaries: Insights for Ethics of Extractive Knowledge from Post-Colonial Contexts

One of the key insights that post-colonial theory has brought to the world of research, and academia more broadly, is the historically fictional, and perhaps impossible, notion of research as “neutral” or “objective”. Though articulations about the deeply ideological nature of certain seemingly “neutral” practices or observations within research do have antecedents in, for instance, Marx’s critique of classical political economy as a product of bourgeois ideology or the work of early Western feminists in dismantling “biological” explanations of female inferiority, post-colonial critiques in relation to research add at least two important conceptual devices which researchers must grapple with.

Firstly, that “colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination” (Mohanty 61), meaning that structural character of knowledge production within such a relationship will tend towards the same domination, even if presented as being outside of it. To choose an easy example, a relationship of colonial domination “opens up” subjects to researchers coming from the dominant social group via the implicit backing of force by the colonial state which otherwise would not have been available to them. This is true even if the researcher themselves has no direct relationship with that state and may be notionally opposed to its policies of force, but nevertheless is likely in a position of benefitting from both its protection (which is not afforded or…